1. Field of the Invention
The subject disclosure relates to systems and methods for creating, maintaining and distributing electronic documents in a distributed computing network.
2. Background of the Related Art
Historically, authoring and modifying websites has been an expensive and labor intensive task that required significant technical knowledge. With that knowledge, it was not difficult to modify a screen element in a website, for example to edit or replace text or switch one image with another. However, any architectural changes to a web screen, such as changing the design of its table or frames, or adding new multimedia components such as video or audio, required significant effort. As a result, most websites remained essentially unchanged for months or even years after creation.
The nature of web authoring helped define the world wide web as historically encyclopedic in nature, a massive compendium of virtual information that, placed online, was far more static than dynamic. While an email connotes a very transient and short-lived piece of information, a website suggests information that is much more monolithic and unchanging.
Many web authoring applications and tools have been developed to make web authoring easier and more accessible to the technically unsophisticated. Some web hosts advertise that anyone can create a website in minutes, using their online tools. This web authoring simplicity is achieved through the use of prefigured templates that are the electronic equivalent of painting by numbers and limit the web author's options.
The challenge is to break the dichotomy that web authors must either: master a demanding technological learning curve and work in HTML code or through complex and time-consuming applications that generate such code; or create basic and constricted websites that have already been partially designed and constructed for them.